8 Reasons to Consider Cloud Anti-spam

8 Reasons to Consider Cloud Anti-spam

Startup companies and businesses who want an alternative to on-premise anti-spam technologies are moving towards hosted services. Cloud anti-spam solutions are an efficient and effective weapon available in the fight against spam, and it’s time you took a look at all the advantages they have to offer. By filtering out all the spam, screening every message and attachment for malware, and protecting your users from phishing attacks, cloud anti-spam solutions can help you extend the life of your existing infrastructure. Even the most conservative estimates place spam as over 50% of the average company’s email volume, and even aging servers can find new life and new user capacity when cloud anti-spam is handling the heavy lifting. Reducing the load on your mail servers can be reason enough, but here are eight more reasons to move to cloud anti-spam solutions.

1. It’s highly effective

Cloud anti-spam solutions take advantage of economies of scale in bandwidth and capacity, so they are far better suited to handle sudden spikes in spam volume when the worm of the month starts up. The volume of messages they process enables their smart filters to quickly learn and identify new types of spam, and can be much more accurate in filtering out the garbage without any false positives.

2. It can be less expensive

Cloud anti-spam solutions typically offer their customers a very attractive cost model, based on a per user/per month subscription plan. There are no capital investments or other upfront costs. There’s no software maintenance or annual renewals for updates. You can scale up or down as your staffing levels change and have a very predictable spend.

3. It saves you bandwidth

By filtering out all the spam, malware, and phishing messages, the only email that hits your border is legitimate email. Even SMBs will find that saves them hundreds of megabytes per day, which can save real money on bandwidth costs, or make what was a saturate pipe suddenly full of excess capacity.

4. It saves you disk space

It would be great if we could just delete every suspect message, but the risk of false positives means we need a quarantine folder, just in case. That can easily take up gigabytes of disk space, and may grow to fill your disk if you don’t keep up with it on a regular basis.

5. It saves you server resources

We alluded to this in the intro, but it bears repeating here. The CPU cycles and RAM demands of email servers are already high, and when they have to run filters, multiple DNS queries, expand compressed attachments into memory to scan them for malware, check the whitelists and black lists, they truly stretch your resources to the limits. With cloud anti-spam solutions sending only clean email through, your servers will have less to process, and many customers choose to only run anti-malware (which is prudent) on their servers once their cloud solution is handling all the spam.

6. It saves you (and your users) time

One of the best feature sets cloud anti-spam solutions offer is what I like to call user self-service. Each user can receive a daily, personal summary of all filtered email, and can click a link to release any message that might be a false positive. They can also check their individual quarantine at any time, which means no more help desk tickets asking you to look for a missing email. And since everything is in the cloud and handled by the service provider, you don’t have to deal with updating lists, patching operating systems, and other maintenance tasks an in-house solution would require.

7. It’s there even when your server isn’t

Not every cloud anti-spam solution offers this, so check to make sure yours does. In the event of an outage with your ISP, or maintenance on your server, the best solutions offer the ability to send and receive email through their web based portal, so your users can continue to work even when mail on premises isn’t.

8. It can archive for you

Cloud anti-spam solutions are already processing all your email, so it’s a natural service enhancement for them to offer archiving. Whether you want this for data preservation, or need this for compliance, you can select this optional service without having to add yet another application or appliance onto your network. It’s fast, it’s easy, and it’s effective.

When evaluating which type of anti-spam technology best suits your organization and its budget, cloud anti-spam is an option you should seriously consider. With no up-front costs or hardware to install, they are incredibly easy to deploy with no more than a simple DNS change on the inbound, and SMTP relay on the outbound. Check out cloud anti-spam solutions today. You’ll be glad you did.

This guest post was provided by GFI Software Ltd. GFI is a leading software developer that provides a single source for network administrators to address their network security, content security and messaging needs. Learn more about the benefits of using cloud anti-spam.

All product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.